Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!mit-eddie!bbn.com!diamond.bbn.com!tcrowley From: tcrowley@bbn.com (Terry Crowley) Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.andrew Subject: Re: Tabs Message-ID: <14360@jade.BBN.COM> Date: 26 Jul 90 13:43:00 GMT References: <4afar0e00VsSI9aWoD@andrew.cmu.edu> Organization: BBN Laboratories Incorporated, Cambridge, MA Lines: 23 Andy, thanks for your post. I'm also certainly very conscious of the problems with interactions between tabs and the difference between screen and printer fonts. For many purposes, the table semantics you discuss would be superior to trying to make do with "typewriter" style tabs (although most typewriters don't support right, centered, decimal, etc). But, this might be an example of a case of "the best is the enemy of the good". Even with the problems of differences between screen and printer fonts, tabs are extremely useful. While a table editor is appropriate for many things, consider all those "informal" 2 and 3 line tables that can easily make do with a simple notion of tabs, or with tabs used at the beginning of the line where character widths don't create a problem or with tabs used in a style with fixed-width fonts. There are some simple things a user can do to get around the problem even for bigger tables. They're the same kind of thing a troff user learns when using the raw tabbing of troff (instead of tbl). For example, set an explicit tab stop and tab over once rather than using (a different number of) multiple tabs on each line. Terry